Yesterday, a lone gunman killed 9 and wounded 7 people in Umpqua Community College (UCC), a picturesque campus in Roseburg, Oregon. In a shootout with police, the shooter himself was killed. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, however, said 13 people died.
Here’s what we are told about the massacre thus far:
1. The killer singled out Christians
Stacy Boylen, whose daughter was one of the wounded, told CNN that the gunman started “asking people one by one what their religion was. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them, and if you’re a Christian stand up. And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you are going to see God in just about one second.’ And then he shot and killed them.”
A twitter user named @bodhilooney tweeted that according to her grandmother, who was at the scene of the carnage, if victims said they were Christian “then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn’t answer, they were shot in the legs.”
Student Kortney Moore, 18, said she saw the teacher of her Writing 115 class get shot in the head at the college’s Snyder Hall before the gunman started asking people to state their religion and opening fire.
The killer’s disdain for religion was evident in an online profile, in which he became a member of a “doesn’t like organized religion” group on an Internet dating site.
2. The killer
His name is Chris Harper-Mercer, 26. He carried 3 pistols and a rifle.
It is believed Harper-Mercer was the anonymous poster on the chat forum, 4chan, who wrote this ominous comment the night before: “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest. happening thread will be posted tomorrow morning. so long space robots.”
Reportedly, other posters on 4chan cheered him on.
Harper-Mercer’s online profiles indicate he had a fascination with the terror tactics of the Irish Republican Army, and bought Nazi memorabilia. In a blog post, he wrote this about Vester Lee Flanagan, who murdered a Virginia newswoman and cameraman live on air: “Seems like the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”
3. The gun-free college has only one unarmed guard
Joe Olson, a former president of Umpqua Community College, said that it has only one unarmed security officer and that the community decided against armed guards last year.
4. Obama immediately called for gun control
When news came about the shooting, despite the fact that reports that UCC is a gun-free zone and had only one unarmed guard, Obama immediately and illogically called again for gun control, bemoaning that America is “the only advanced country on earth [that] sees these kind of mass shooting every few months.”
Someone really should ask this POS about Chicago — a gun-control city where every weekend is marked by multiple gun shootings and carnage.
Chicago is the poster child for how gun control does NOTHING to stop gun violence, as chronicled every week by our DCG. See her latest post, “Gun control, Chicago style: More Than 50 People Shot for the Second Weekend in a Row in Chicago.”
Sources: New York Post; CNN
~Éowyn